What I Learned About American History From Taking A Bunch Of Brits On A Civil War Tour

The last time I set foot on American soil was 2010. The last time I actually lived here was 2009. It is good to be back.

Sometimes it helps to step outside your own culture to get a better look at who you are as a people and as a nation. I am getting that chance right now, in spades. Last week and this week, I am acting in my other professional role, serving as the lead historian for two different groups of British military. We are traveling across Civil War battlefields of the Eastern Theater, and I am seeing our war through their eyes. It is a fascinating perspective.

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I readily admit that this is an aspect of my profession that I truly love. Not just teaching people through the vehicle of history, but learning from those I am teaching as well. Learning by listening to the types of questions that they ask, when they ask them, and what prompted the question in the first place. Here are a few of the more obvious observations I made last week while moving across the battlefields of Bull Run, Antietam, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, and Gettysburg.

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1. Other countries really do not teach their own histories quite as completely as we do. Yes, sure, I am an academic historian. I am supposed to know a lot of history. But in country after country where I have lived (Egypt, Iraq, Afghanistan, Italy, England, to name just those I called home for at least half a year) I learn that large chunks of their own histories are mysteries to many who live there. My tentative hypothesis is generous. I suspect that most other nations, having so much more history than we Americans have, must pick-and-choose what they pass on to the next generations. As my oldest daughter once commented on Facebook after visiting me in Rome and seeing the Forum (and sitting on a fallen column below the Temple of Jupiter): "They have SO much history here, they just let you sit on it!" It might be wise to take this into general consideration as we interact with other nations.

2. Some history is a complete no-no in other nations. We, at least, discuss and debate the contentious elements of some of our history. Slavery, most obviously, versus the shibboleth of "states rights" that some Confederate apologists put forward, is an issue still very much in play today, 148 years after we settled the issue. But in many European and Asian nations, topics are off limits. Germans cannot really talk about the scourge that was National Socialism. The English, by and large, really do not want to talk about wars that involved religion. The French strangely have something of an aversion to Napoleon nowadays.

3. We really do look strange to the Europeans, with our celebration of our martial past, even if it is a past partially fought against ourselves. I have been across Italy searching for the most famous battles in Western History in places like Cannae where Hannibal won one of the most crushing victories ever -- and found nothing. Not a single marker, not the least trace of an interpretive sign. In England, I live just a few hundred yards from where a king and a queen fought it out, the Battle of Tewkesbury in 1471, and the story is the same. Not so much as a plank with a sign on it to indicate what happened there. Coming over here, seeing Antietam and Gettysburg, for example, blows British minds.

So perhaps, all things considered, we do not need to be as distressed in our teaching of history. We may only have a few hundred years of it, but what we have, we remember.

The opinions here are only those of the author and do not reflect the DoD, the Army, or any unit with which he is affiliated…though I know a bunch of Brits who would agree with me. I can be reached at R_Bateman_LTC@hotmail.com.